mirror man prog 24/4/2001 4:06 pm Page 1 presents MIRROR MAN (A Geography Of Sound in Two Acts) DAVIDTHOMAS PALE ORCHESTRA &CHORUS NEO-BEAT MUSIC THEATRE ‘A vivid, multi-faceted expression of the troubled space between memory and reality’ Chicago Tribune In association with mirror man prog 24/4/2001 4:06 pm Page 2 presents MIRROR MAN (A Geography Of Sound in Two Acts) DAVIDTHOMAS PALE ORCHESTRA &CHORUS NEO-BEAT MUSIC THEATRE The promoters of this tour acknowledge financial assistance from the Arts Council of England, the ON TOUR MAY 2001 Regional Arts Boards, District and County Councils and Local Authorities. SUN 20 BRACKNELL South Hill Park Arts Centre 8PM Tape recording and photography are forbidden unless prior authorization has been given. 01344 484123 www.southhillpark.org.uk Produced by Concert Clinic for CMN Tours MON 21 COVENTRY Warwick Arts Centre 7.30PM Tour produced by: Rob Challice, Helen Neale, Emily Prowse and 024 7652 4524 www.warwick.ac.uk/artscentre Jessy Hunter @ Concert Clinic, 35 Britannia Row, London N1 8QH WED 23 MANCHESTER Contact Theatre 8PM Tel: +44 (0)20 7354 8000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7704 8999 0161 274 0600 www.contact-theatre.org.uk www.concertclinic.com THU 24 STIRLING Cowane Theatre 7.30PM 01786 473544 Tour funded and executively produced by CMN Tours presented as part of Le Weekend CMN Producer: Beverley Crew FRI 25 SALISBURY Arts Centre 8PM CMN Administrator: Marcel Jenkins 01722 320333 www.salisburyarts.co.uk Press: Caroll Pinkham @ Vision Unlimited presented as part of Salisbury Festival www.salisburyfestival.co.uk National Advertising:The Cogency SAT 26 LONDON Queen Elizabeth Hall 7.45PM Marketing: The Cogency 020 7960 4242 www.rfh.org.uk presented by sbc Design: COG Design Photo of David Thomas: Fin Costello SUN 27 BRIGHTON Gardner Arts Centre 8PM 01273 709709 / 685861 www.brighton-festival.org.uk CMN has produced this programme free of charge for audiences presented as part of Brighton Festival CMN - the best in contemporary music on tour www.cmntours.org.uk mirror man prog 24/4/2001 4:06 pm Page 4 Act 1: Act 2: Jack & The General Surf's Up in Bay City! Act 1 happens Out There. Across a On the other side of every desert is, and series of roadside diners and truckstops, always has been, Bay City. Bay City is under bug-swarmed lampposts -inter- where the journey ends, where the unstop- state susurration in the air -characters pable Great Westward Urge meets the tell their stories in the blasted light of one immovable Pacific Object and loses, where more black coffee dawn. all travellers must come to a separate A radio spins out dreams of all the peace or be swallowed up. At a bus-stop futures that will never be to the backdrop in the promised land the same set of char- of a haunted neon landscape. acters waits for the sense of motion to finally stop - as they wonder just what that Mirror Man (David) might actually feel like. Lost Nation Road (Robert) MIRROR MAN Bay City (David) Florida (Daved) By David Thomas Ghosts (Jackie) Montana (David) Man In The Dark (David) Morbid Sky (Jackie) Narrator: David Thomas Black Coffee Dawn (Robert) Nowheresville (Linda) Radio Voice: Bob Holman Bus Called Happiness (Linda) Memphis (Robert) Singers: Linda Thompson, Jackie Leven, Robert Kidney, Daved Hild If The Deer Blinks (Daved) Over The Moon (Linda) Musicians: Keith Moliné (guitar), Andy Diagram (trumpet), Jack Kidney (sax & Surf’s Up (Jackie & Linda) Weird Cornfields (Robert) harp), Chris Cutler (percussion) 3 Things (David) Sound mixer: Dids Mirror Man achieves version 3.0 in the Scenographer & technical director: Danny Grace Contemporary Music Network's production. The 2nd Act has been completely rewritten Tour manager: Lynne Thomas since its premiere (version 1.2) at the Production assistant: Jeff Thomas Disastodrome Mini-Meltdown, Queen Set painting, fabrication & carpentry: Rod Montàgue, Andy Joicey & Helen Hobbs Elizabeth Hall, April 2-5, 1998. The staging Management: Nick Hobbs for both Acts has been radically revised. Bob Holman, Daved Hild and Jane Bombane contributed to the libretto Version 3.0, for all intents & purposes, is a new production. (Version 2.0 featured at the Email: [email protected] FIMAV festival in Victoriaville, Quebec, Website: www.projex.demon.co.uk Canada, May 21, 2000.) mirror man prog 24/4/2001 4:06 pm Page 6 Written and compiled by Pere Ubu founder David Thomas, Mirror Man is a hybrid of neo-Beat opera and the tent meeting testimony of a chorus of poet- witnesses whose wind blown voices have been retrieved from ghost towns that lie just over every horizon. Oh, yes, Mirror Man is an Opera of The Road: songs about places that don't exist and stories about the people who live in them - “Thomas’ gnostic argument - that art exists to at once reveal secrets and to ordinary people who've been abandoned by the future, forbidden access to the preserve them - makes sense of a particularly American - or modern - form of past, and set adrift in a mirage-like Now where Culture has become a weapon storytelling. In a big, multifaceted democracy, you’re supposed to be able to used against them, where all the words are owned by liars and everywhere the communicate directly with everyone, yet many despair of being understood by media are installed as priests and as the sole mediators between man and the anyone at all. world. Native folk culture in 21st Century America is a driven and heroic scrab- bling together of Order & Meaning using materials at hand, the detritus of dis- "Out of this comes an American language that means to tell a story no one can posable culture, fragments of pop songs, handcrafted iconographies, and the turn away from. But this language - identified by D. H. Lawrence in 1923, in odd issue of Practical Mechanics magazine. It is a strange double loopback Studies in Classic American Literature, as the true modernist voice, the voice of inversion of cargo culture and you see it everywhere, out there in the middle of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville - is cryptic before it is anything else. It is all hints and nowhere, abandoned gas stations, forlorn handcrafted theme parks: warnings, and the warnings are disguised as non sequiturs. The secret is told, Rattlesnake World, Motel Dust, Cafe Despair... and you ask yourself, "Why did but nonetheless hidden, in the musings, babblings, or tall tales of people who anyone ever think to build that thing out here?" Then you look around and you seem too odd to be like you or me, like us - like the author who puts his or her don't see anyone. "So, it's trailsign," you say to yourself. "There's been some- name to the story, insisting that he made it all up, that she just did it for the thing broken pass thru here." money. The inspiration for Mirror Man is Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters “The whole existence of such people is premised on their attempt to tell a (1869-1950), a sequence of companion poems published in 1915. Melodramatic, secret, perhaps to discover the secret in the telling, in the stunned, shocked even marginally hysterical, it is distinguished by a powerful narrative vehicle. response the telling provokes - and their idea of democracy is premised on the 244 "residents" of a small town's graveyard tell the stories of their lives. The tes- conviction that no one can be at home in a place where it is presumed there timonies, and the sum of the points of view, reveal the "secret" of the fictional are no secrets, that all reality is transparent, that all people are the same. Thus town of Spoon River. those who tell this story, who want desperately to be heard, will likely mistrust even an imaginary audience. If they are like Thomas... they'll create an aura of (Aside from Mr Thomas: I think my fascination with the narrative must have portent and unease, but mostly, as it were, sinistramente, with the left hand; by intensified following a hieroglyphic fusion / confusion of Spoon River with the means of unfinished sentences, dead-end monologues, floating images, out- Perry Como ballad, Moon River, thereby transforming the pop song into an evo- moded phrases, archaic pronunciations, a tone of voice that is blank and cation of some haunted human tragedy that reaches across generations to pos- sess the song's narrator, driving him to dream only of a redemptive, and self- addled by turn.” - Greil Marcus, "Double Trouble" (Faber and Faber, 2000), pages 167-168. immolating transit of Moon / Spoon River. "In style. Someday.") mirror man prog 24/4/2001 4:06 pm Page 8 The Pale Orchestra David Thomas (narrator & melodeon) The Pale Orchestra is an ensemble of singers, poets and musicians. The musi- Founder and singer of legendary avant-rock band Pere Ubu, David Thomas cians are accomplished improvisers of both song and soundscape. The singer / has been rewriting the rules of popular music for over 25 years. Formed in poets are masters of the expressive voice - passionate, inventive and capable Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975, Pere Ubu integrated found-sound, analog synthesiz- of improvising revelatory detail. The score and libretto leave space to encour- ers and musique concrete into a hybrid of overdriven midwestern garage age spontaneity and inspiration in both music and word, resulting in fresh and rock tempered by abstract sensibilities. The band's first release, The Modern surprising nuances each night. It is a process that is in part testifying, in part Dance (1978), can be found on all sorts of critics' lists of "The Great Albums." epiphany and in part misunderstanding.